The League is also against the Episcopo Council's "secure website": "It's not transparency, it's a filtered narrative."

" We have learned of the Municipality of Foggia's initiative called 'My Secure Site – Transparency and Trust Through the Institutional Website', through which the administration intends to combat so-called fake news by promoting the Municipality's website as the only reliable source of institutional information." This is reported in a statement from the Lega party in Foggia, which criticizes the anti-fake news project of the municipal administration led by Maria Aida Episcopo. The initiative has already been contested by its allies in the Brothers of Italy party, who have called it an "authoritarian drift."

"The Foggia League expresses strong doubts about this approach," it continues, "behind the veneer of transparency lies a clear attempt to steer public communication toward a unilateral and self-referential model, which only validates what comes from within and delegitimizes everything from outside. This isn't transparency; it's a filtered narrative. It's not trust; it's message control."

In a joint statement, the Foggia League states: "This initiative risks turning the Municipality's website into a means of propaganda and self-celebration, rather than a tool for pluralistic information. Citizens have the right to access free, critical, even inconvenient sources, and cannot be steered toward a 'certified truth' from above."

Institutional communications should be open to discussion, not entrenched behind labels like "secure site," which evoke closed and self-referential communication models. If we truly want to promote transparency, we should give a voice to neighborhoods and citizens, respond to reports, publish real data, and address problems with courage and clarity. But transparency should not be confused with control.

Freedom of expression, political criticism, and free information can never be subordinated to institutional self-certification. The Municipality should work to solve problems, not to certify what can be said or thought.

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